Equal Measure
by vargrimar
Summary: Edward is not hers. This, she knows, is the world's second certainty. [Kiddway with genderqueer James/Mary.]


Edward is not hers.

This, she knows, is the world's second certainty.

He is a selfish man, and one who belongs to a great many things. He belongs to the sea and its endless horizon. He belongs to the _Jackdaw_ , to his faithful crew, and to the freedom they promise. He belongs to white beaches with salt in his hair and a bottle in his hand, to the sunbleached wood of Inauga's docks. He belongs to coin-rife chests, sacks of fine spices, barrels of liquid gold; he belongs to riches and treasures and prizes, all.

He even belongs to a woman in England by the name of Caroline, a woman he claims to miss but does not write, and it is not for lack of letters—she has seen them, crumpled, torn, tucked into the folds of his robes, crushed in the scarred knot of a fist, old and unsent.

A good reminder, she supposes. Belonging to so much can be a bloody painful thing, and when it comes time to let it all go, that belonging can make it all the more excruciating.

Mary—James, now, bound by cloth and a swath of red—watches Edward from the manor's open threshold as he pores over the weathered map of his fleet. Afternoon sunshine slants through elongated windows and dapples the blond mess of his hair, shortening the shadows cast in the grooves of his collarbone, his brow, his jaws. He looks a proper captain even without the accompaniment of his swords and pistols. The costume is missed in favor of the plain shirt and trousers he wears beneath, but he carries himself in such a way that Assassins' colors are not needed.

(In truth, they never were.)

It might seem a scene almost domestic if not for the array of plundered weapons and artworks displayed so brazenly about du Casse's old room. James knows better, Mary knows better; Edward does love to keep tokens of the things to which he belongs, and this once-Templar relic is no exception. She finds it strange that he keeps tokens of things to which he does not belong—the Brotherhood, for instance, an insult to Ah Tabai—but if he wishes to surround himself in mementos and false keepsakes, she will not be the one to stop him.

Edward has a one-track mind, after all. If he wants something, he takes it, and there is none on this earth who can convince him otherwise.

He is stubborn. Obstinate. Proud. Pirate to the bloody end.

(Pirate to a bloody fault.)

A sigh of frustration pervades the wandering dust motes that float amongst the wooden joists and floorboards. Edward flattens his palms over the curling parchment, quill and inkwell set to the side, his brow creased in deep thought. His jaw sets just so, mouth thinned and sea-swept eyes cast to the yellowed sheet beneath his fingerprints. It's the sort of look he gets when he's trying to overcome a riddle; one James knows all too well, and one Mary knows even better.

She is tempted to cross the room, to lean against the table's edge, arms folded, and ask if he would care to entertain an activity that is less strain on the mind. It has happened before, a time that numbers a dozen or so, and a time or three more before Edward knew James as Mary. She knows it wouldn't take much for him to agree—if she grins and chaffs and makes him feel a fool, he'd all but swoop from the table and lock her against the wall because humbling Edward somehow yields better results than bolstering his ego, and then it would be bed-bound for them both.

But James cannot share his bed. Not in broad daylight. Mary can, but her presence in Edward's quaint cove is only a pause in pursuit of another contract. She knows that James's crew will look for him when he does not appear after sundown. Captain Kidd, _ten times the demon his father was_ , demands punctuality upon his ship, and he will not suffer a late shove-off.

Mary will not suffer it, either. Time is of the essence. There are slavers to remove and Templars to snuff out. Ah Tabai expects her to return in three weeks' time, and she has every intent on returning to Tulum with blood on her blade. An afternoon in Edward's bed will lend to an evening in Edward's bed, and then perhaps to a day or three in Edward's bed—and her target's movements allow for no such indulgence.

Regardless, the temptation persists. If it weren't for the threat of discovery, it would be easy to strip and seduce. The besotted look suits Edward well; he becomes a creature of sly smiles and lusty laughs, sun-bronzed shoulders marked by ink and teeth. The gravel-rough timbre of his voice makes for a worthy rival, low and coarse when he's hilt deep and gasping curses into the sheets. And when they are sweat-slick and spent, he curls in beside her, a leg crooked too tenderly between her own, breathing into her hair with a hand framing the space between her shoulder blades.

It might be more difficult to resist if Edward wouldn't say such stupid things in the aftermath. There must be something about it, she thinks, being so naked and vulnerable with another person. Something must make his senses skitter awry, leaving his mouth to voice things that are best kept hid away.

Things like _you're beautiful_.

(James knows it's hollow.)

Things like _you should stay a while longer_.

(Mary knows that is hollow as well.)

Things like _we should sail together, you and I_.

(But the way he murmurs it, soft and quiet against the sun-kissed skin of her brow, it makes her think—Christ, maybe it isn't so hollow after all.)

They always web little threads of hope where they shouldn't be. More often than not, she finds herself excising them like shards of shattered shot in the thick of her leg. She must dig them out long after James has fled to the sanctuary of Tulum, to the familiarity of a contract; she draws them clean with the edge of a knife and picks at the runnels of scar tissue in their wake, bewildered, because the last time she'd felt a pang this sharp was at The Three Horseshoes nigh a lifetime ago.

Perhaps this is her punishment, she thinks. Perhaps this is the price for seeing the man's true potential. She must endure his wanton greed and his unabashed self-interest and all of his pointless chasing for something he does not and cannot understand, and in her attempt to coax the better out of him—the better she _knows_ exists inside, the heart that _does_ beat in that God damned chest of his—that sense of _belonging_ comes prowling in as sure and inevitable as the rising tide, and it twists something terrible.

Where James would mask it with a smile, Mary masks it with stoicism. She lifts her shoulder from the wooden trim of the threshold and takes a step back out into the corridor. The soles of her boots utter barely a noise as she pivots on her heel. A cool breeze gliding from the opened manor doors cuts at the stifling humidity, but it does little to still the harrowing thrum caged beside her lungs.

The village below beckons with the crowing of sauced pirates and self-made merchants. The shape of James's ship looms in the cove's shallows, sails hoisted and cargo stowed. It will be a while yet until the crew is ready, but there is no need to further lurk on Kenway's doorstep.

Mary affords him one final glance. He leans there still, jaws set, brow dimpled, hands splayed upon the parchment, a marked tension in his shoulders. It is a rare thing to see him so sober, and perhaps that is what drives a corkscrew between her heartstrings. If he had a care, he could prove himself worthy of those robes and render them a false keepsake no longer. He could truly make something of himself; he could serve a higher cause than simple pirates' commitments of rum and plunder. If he might keep himself dry, sharpen his senses, hone his skills, somehow temper that unfettered lust for gold—God's sake, if she could just fucking _convince_ him—he would make an absolutely brilliant Assassin.

But he is not hers to convince. The shrapnel aches do well to remind her of that fact. Each time she departs from Inagua's secluded shore, she does so with splinters in her veins, and the painstaking process of plucking out the fragments is a bloody business in which she takes no pleasure. His company should not leave her feeling so raw and inexplicably cross with a predicament she cannot change, but it does, constantly, continuously, and yet Mary still returns on fair winds with the occasional cask and fleeting rumor, drawn to something that which cannot be had.

Blunted nails etching crescents into the scarred skin of her palms, she exits the corridor. James steps off the manor porch with his cocksure countenance and follows the dirt path down to the village below. His grins and leers are required, as that is what will get her through the dregs of yet another excision, and so she embraces him in earnest.

When James reaches his ship, he hauls himself up atop the center mast. Squinting beneath the blinding sunshine, he spares a look toward the manor spiking beyond the island's emerald jungle, the white paint a brilliant smear along the crags. The world begins to slow, growing monochrome and muted, and for a long, quiet moment, the telltale shimmering trickles between the roll of the waves.

Edward is not hers, he thinks. He is not Mary's. He is not James's, either. Edward belongs to a great many things, rum and plunder and pirate commitments among, but he does not belong to them. That is as certain as the Brotherhood's creed.

And that, he supposes, is for the best, because belonging to so much can be painful—and to damn the man to a life with James Kidd or Mary Read would only be another excruciating weight that yet might drown him in the end.

But while belonging to so much can be a bloody painful thing, _not_ belonging—

(And he knows it shouldn't, she knows it shouldn't; they know, they know, they know—)

 _Not_ belonging seems to hurt in equal measure.


End file.
